The National Institute of General Medical Sciences has awarded $15.4 million to the University of California, San Diego, to establish a center for the study of systems biology, a relatively new branch of science that maps interactions between regulatory molecules in order to understand how complex biological systems work.
The UC San Diego Center for Systems Biology will focus on interactions involved in cells’ responses to stress, said director Alexander Hoffmann, professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the Division of Physical Sciences.
Researchers at the new center will analyze interactions among all of the genes and proteins within a cell in response to potentially harmful changes in the environment, then test the functions of specific genetic “circuits” involved in the response by recreating them in isolation using synthesized genes.